This Guy Built A Job-Application Machine And Applied For 1000+ Jobs At Once

You recently left your job. Now, you start applying for jobs, and you might go follow-up 10 or maybe 20 companies at once. But what if you ended up with more than 1,000 job applications, that too made accidently.

Robert Coombs, who works at a national non-profit since 2012, started seeking jobs at major tech companies when he realized the teams which were trained under his supervision got better than him. While applying, Coombs discerned that most of such big firms deploy applicant tracking systems (ATS) designed to filter recruits by different keywords such as the previous workplace, schooling, academics, etc.

Coombs says he is not from an engineering background but he is known for somehow automating things for data processing, web content, etc. He devised a similar tool, which he modestly calls a robot, to automate the process of his job application. Basically, his system is a digital implementation of the Rube Goldbergian contraption, composed of crawlers, spreadsheets, and scripts.